ABSTRACT
Does Christ’s work have to have a certain intrinsic objective moral value in order for it to be acceptable to God as an act of atonement? This question is part and parcel of classical theological discussion of the atonement. Famously, Duns Scotus, and those who followed him, argued that divine justice does not require the death of the God-Man as recompense for human sin. On one understanding of Scotus’s position, God could have accepted some act of atonement that had less objective moral and forensic value, and still have been just in so acting. As Richard Cross puts it, ‘On Scotus’s account, an act is meritorious if and only if God assigns a reward for it’.1 But this doctrine, usually called acceptatio or acceptation, seems to be entirely wrongheaded to me. So does the related idea that the value of any act of atonement is entirely up to God and has nothing to do with any intrinsic merit the action in question possesses. This latter view, called acceptilatio, or acceptilation,2 is sometimes conflated with acceptation.3 In this chapter, I shall argue that both the notions of acceptilation and acceptation are mistaken. God
that there are only certain divine action types that could be acts of atonement, rather than any divine act. Acceptilation could be taken either way, although if the latter were adopted, some explanation of why only some divine action types might be acts of atonement would need to be given.
